


They'll Never Say

by orphan_account



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Speculation, follow for more soft spoilers, not really spoiler-y but read at your own risk, scorpion cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 10:07:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3377543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah finds Helena at the military base.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They'll Never Say

**Author's Note:**

> And you will try to do what you did before  
> Pull the wool over your eyes for a week or more  
> Let your family take you back to your  
> Original mind.
> 
> \--Fleet Foxes, He Doesn't Know Why

"I’m not going to touch you," Sarah says as she stoops over the lip of the bathtub. Helena crouches in the belly of the tub, clawing at porcelain like the bars of a cage. 

Thoughts weave like snakes in her mind, bundling into an incomprehensible mass.

 _Why does pain always find you_?  _Why not me_? (thank god) (thank Siobhan and Amelia and Tomas) (thank that fickle choice we call fate). 

Helena’s breath shivers through her skin like a scuttling thing and burrows deep into her throat; Sarah can almost hear the same questions echoing in her head “ _why why why why_.”

  
The words harden into a glassy film over her eyes and blind her. “ _Why why why_ ” is all she sees, all she hears, as she casts a deep, uncomprehending stare onto Sarah.

Maybe it's the gleam of Helena's shellacked eyes, or the tangle of hysteria and panic shared with each breath, but the hairs on the back of her neck rise in a path shared by the spindle-legged gait of a scorpion.

She can still see those hardened shells, slick with blood, worming through intestine and flesh as they sucked her sister's blood like the innards of insects.

The body of a man lay crumpled at the door behind them, bleeding through a jagged hole in his neck.

Already, he's decomposing in her mind--losing flesh and muscle with second until all that remains are the few short sentences that will explain his death:  _Helena didn't recognize him, I'm sure. He tried calming her down and touched her. I couldn't do anything after that_. 

When she fails to convince herself of this, she'll drop even those few clacking finger-bones of a story. When they ask, she'll shrug and say, "I hardly knew Paul Dierden."

 _Why, why, why_. There's one for each of them: the dead, the dying, and the damned. 

' _I don't know_ ,' she thinks. So she stretches her hand toward her sister and waits for the moment when Helena can reach out again--can stand to be human again--she'll wait all night.

She'll wait until her hand aches from the stress of time. 

**Author's Note:**

> I know this is short. shhh. I should have been doing homework.


End file.
